At Sphere, employee recognition is a key component of our corporate culture. We believe in celebrating the successes of our talented people! One way we recognize our team members is though our #SphereHeroes program.
Every month we select a team member who shows exemplary individual achievement, contribution, and performance in their job. Past winners were selected because of their ideas, creativity, team work, thought leadership, and calculated risk-taking to support continuous improvement.
Today, we’d like to recognize our December 2018 Sphere Hero – a true rock star in his field – Artem Korenev.
Artem oversees large software development teams. His work is highly visible with clients and team members alike. Aside from his direct responsibilities, Artem actively participates in Sphere’s internal activities, including management and oversight of our in-house cloud-based feedback and performance management system, hosting our recent SphereCon in Kiev, Ukraine, providing ideas for external blogs that would be of interest to our audience, and interviewing job candidates – just to name a few.
Q. What is the most important thing you have learned since you started working at Sphere?
A. One of the main things that I have learned is not about technology or other skills like project management or scrum master. What’s really important is to have the ability to listen and understand people (both my team members and our clients), to collaborate with them in the most effective way taking into account their weaknesses and strengths, their personal qualities, their needs and aspirations.
The second important point is learning to to see the whole project, or as they say being able to see not just the trees but the forest. When you have a clear big picture, you are equipped to make better decisions along the way.
Q. How is IT project management different from project management in other functional areas?
A. In IT, we have a lot of challenges/issues/questions that often do not come with prepared answers or solutions. IT IT Project management needs to adapt and adjust on the fly when you are faced with an issue that seems impossible to solve. Great developers have the mental agility to adjust and adapt in real time. We’re always on the look-out for really smart people with lots of mental flexibility – if you know anyone, send them our way.
Q. What projects make you most proud?
A. The Sphere team has recently and very quickly built a B2B solution for one of our clients.They worked with a budget and a project timeline that was less than ideal but still managed to produce a solution that was so amazing that our client’s R&D decided to fully replace their own solution with ours! I am very proud of what my team accomplished here.
Q. Who would you like to hire? What kind of people do you enjoy working with?
A. I am an enthusiast of my profession and I look for like-minded people with the same system of values: positive attitude, being inspired by what they do, go-getters who are looking for creative ways to get things accomplished and don’t look for excuses.
Q. Artem – how do you approach project management?
A. I believe a project manager is someone who is responsible for the success of the project directly. A good project manager directs all of their actions and activity to getting things done. In the words of Warren Bennis “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality”.
Q. Define leadership in the context of software development.
A. A software development team leader is capable of resolving issues in a fast and effective way and makes decisions having examined all angles and resources needed for the
development process. Our people are our main asset. A wise project manager should listen, support the team, and get out of the way so the team can produce quality results.
Thank you, Artem! A big high-five from your friends and colleagues for your dedication to Sphere and to client success!
Stay tuned as we continue to shine a light on the humans of Sphere!
